How do Ontarians feel about taxing carbon? It depends who's asking

The results of two online surveys, one published Tuesday — another Wednesday — offer very different conclusions on how Ontarians feel about ‘putting a price on’ or ‘taxing’ carbon.

With Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown surprising many by committing his party to a revenue-neutral carbon tax, the decidedly anti-carbon tax conservative website The Rebel published an exclusive poll Tuesday showing, their headline declared: “Ontarians overwhelmingly oppose a carbon tax! 82% of Ontario PC supporters also oppose!”

Conducted online between March 18 and March 20, Vancouver-based Torch asked 805 Ontarians one simple question for The Rebel:

Political leaders in Ontario are discussing a carbon tax which would discourage activities that create climate change. It means it will be more expensive to heat your home, drive your car and buy anything that has to be transported significant distances. Do you support or oppose a provincial carbon tax?

Some might quibble with the question; Patrick Brown has proposed returning the proceeds of his proposed carbon tax as a dividend, meaning that while the tax would do what the question suggests — raising the cost of driving a car and heating a home — it shouldn’t, in theory, affect Ontarians’ bottom line.

All the same, the results were, as Rebel co-founder Brian Lilley put it on Twitter: “bad news for pushers of a carbon tax but really bad news for @brownbarrie & the PCs. Huge opposition.”

Torch found 60 percent of Ontarians — with a reported margin of error +/- 3.5, 19 times out of 20 — opposed a provincial carbon tax and 66 per cent of PC voters strongly opposed one.

Bad news for Brown, indeed, which Lilley used to invite readers to “stop the insanity by emailing PC Party leader Patrick Brown and Premier Kathleen Wynne directly” through a form on The Rebel website.

There have been other surveys and polls on the subject, however, and their results don’t exactly line up with what Torch found for The Rebel, suggesting how the question is asked is probably affecting how it’s being answered.

On Wednesday, Abacus Data released a comprehensive report on Canadians’ feelings toward carbon pricing that, while dated (September 2015), has different findings in Ontario.

This is how they posed the question:

“Do you think it is a (very good; good; acceptable; poor; very poor) idea for governments to put a price on carbon emissions as a way of encouraging people and businesses to reduce emissions?”

Carbon tax critics will probably object, as they often do, to the “price on carbon” euphemism.

But Abacus found 38 per cent of Ontarians thought it was either a very good or good idea, which is actually less than the level of support found by Torch (41 per cent).

The major difference between the two being that Abacus included an “acceptable” option that Torch didn’t.

At 36 per cent, “acceptable” was the most popular Abacus answer; 26 per cent were opposed, compared to Torch’s much higher 60.

Though Abacus’ survey was conducted online with Canadians from September 25 to 29, 2015, they did conduct a more recent one from March 16 to 18 that produced nearly identical national numbers — but the sample size was smaller (1,500) and no provincial breakdown was provided.

“Overall, the responses to the questions we re-asked in March 2016 were very similar and mostly within the expected margin of error of the two surveys,” they note in their report.

Unlike Torch, however, Abacus didn’t provide a margin of error, noting that “the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association policy limits statements about margins of sampling error for most online surveys”.

From February 16 to 26, they asked whether “governments should take necessary action to protect the environment, even if such an action could result in an increase of energy costs and hurt some industries.”

With a margin of error of 3.52 per cent, 19 times out of 20, 72.1 per cent of Ontarians agreed that governments should, while 26.4 per cent didn’t; 1.5 per cent didn’t know or didn’t answer.